In-depth guide

RAID: Shadow Legends explained: how it plays, what it costs, and what to check first

A collection RPG with a very large champion roster, a turn-based combat system that rewards planning, and a monetisation model that deserves to be described plainly rather than glossed over. This guide does both.

By Nancy Scott, editor · Published 23 September 2026 · Fact-checked against the public sources listed at the end · Editorial policy

What the game actually is

RAID: Shadow Legends is a free-to-download collection role-playing game. You assemble a small team of champions, send them into turn-based battles, and spend what you win on making that team stronger so it can survive harder battles. There is a story campaign, but the campaign is a means to an end: the long game is building teams that can clear specific pieces of content.

Two things distinguish it from a conventional RPG. The first is that you do not choose your characters — you draw them at random from summoning items. The second is that individual character power comes mostly from equipment and stat tuning rather than from story progression. Both points matter more than any feature list, and both are covered below.

It is worth being blunt about genre. This is a gacha game: a game built around randomised draws that can be accelerated with money. That is not a criticism by itself — plenty of people enjoy the format — but a guide that describes the game without saying so is not describing the game.

Who makes it and who owns it

The game is developed and published by Plarium Games, a studio founded in Israel with offices in several countries. Ownership has changed twice in the game's lifetime, which is worth knowing if you are reading older articles:

The game is built in Unity. Its marketing history is also part of the public record: during 2019 and 2020 it ran an unusually heavy sponsored-video campaign across YouTube and Twitch, heavy enough that the sponsorship read became an internet joke. In February 2020 that campaign drew criticism over how clearly the sponsorships were being disclosed to viewers. We mention it because this page is itself advertising-funded, and it would be odd to hold ourselves to a disclosure standard while staying quiet about the same issue elsewhere.

Where it runs

Mobile: iOS, iPadOS and Android. Desktop: Windows and macOS, through Plarium's own Plarium Play launcher, and also through Steam, the Epic Games Store and the Microsoft Store. Signing in to the same Plarium account carries your progress between mobile and desktop.

There is no console version. The game has not been released on PlayStation, Xbox or Nintendo Switch. If you have read otherwise — including in an earlier version of this page — that was wrong, and it is listed in the corrections.

Expect a multi-gigabyte install, and expect it to grow as content is added. We are not quoting a figure because the download size changes with each release and differs by platform; the store listing you install from shows the current one.

How combat works

Battles are turn-based and automatic-capable: you bring a team, and each champion acts when its Turn Meter fills. The meter fills in proportion to the champion's Speed statistic, so Speed is not one stat among many — it is the stat that decides who acts, how often, and in what order.

On top of turn order sits an affinity system. Champions and enemies each belong to one of four affinities — Magic, Spirit, Force and Void. Three of them form a strong-against cycle, and Void sits outside it, neither strong nor weak against anything. Attacking into an unfavourable affinity gives you a meaningful chance of a weak hit, which is why most players end up keeping more than one team.

Beyond that, champions carry active skills on cooldowns, passive skills, and status effects applied to both sides. The practical skill in the game is less about reflexes than about sequencing: making sure the right debuff lands before the big attack, and that your healer acts before, not after, the enemy's heavy hit.

Champions, factions and rarity

Champions are organised into 16 factions — among them Banner Lords, Barbarians, Dark Elves, Demonspawn, High Elves, Knight Revenant, Lizardmen, Ogryn Tribes, Orcs, Skinwalkers, The Sacred Order, Undead Hordes, Dwarves, Shadowkin, Sylvan Watchers and, added in early 2026, Argonites. Faction membership matters mechanically, because one mode (Faction Wars) only lets you field champions of a single faction.

Rarity runs Common, Uncommon, Rare, Epic, Legendary and Mythical. Higher rarity generally means a higher stat ceiling and more interesting skills, but rarity is not the same as usefulness: several of the most widely recommended champions for early and mid-game content are Rares, and plenty of Legendaries are situational.

The roster is very large and grows continuously. Community champion databases listed more than a thousand champions during 2026. We are deliberately not quoting a precise count — any number printed here is out of date within weeks, and the in-game collection screen is the only authoritative source.

How you get champions

You do not pick champions. You open shards — Mystery, Ancient, Void, Sacred and Primal — and receive a randomly determined champion. Shards are earned through play and are also sold for real money, directly or bundled into packs.

Three honest points about this system:

• The high-rarity outcomes are genuinely unlikely. The overwhelming majority of standard shard pulls return the lowest rarity that shard can produce. The game publishes its summon chances; read them there rather than on a fan site, and read them before, not after, you buy.
• Spending does not guarantee a specific champion. Buying more shards buys more draws, not a chosen result. Any source telling you a particular purchase will get you a named champion is either describing a targeted event with its own explicit rules, or is wrong.
• Pity and mercy mechanics are discussed constantly in the community. Community trackers describe a system that improves your chances after a long run of failures. Treat community-derived thresholds as unverified: they come from aggregated player data, not from a published specification.

Gear, and why it matters more

This is the part most introductory articles skip, and it is the part that decides whether your team works. A champion has six armour slots — Weapon, Helmet, Shield, Gauntlets, Chestplate and Boots — plus accessory slots for a Ring, an Amulet and a Banner.

Each piece carries one main stat, determined by the slot, and up to four substats. Those substats roll randomly and improve as the piece is upgraded. Matching pieces from the same set grant a set bonus, at two or four pieces depending on the set. The upshot is that two pieces that look identical in the inventory can be worth wildly different amounts, and that a well-geared Rare will outperform a badly geared Legendary in most content.

If you take one practical thing from this guide, take this: spend your upgrade materials on gear for a small number of champions rather than spreading thin across a large roster. The beginner guide goes into how to choose them.

The game modes

Content is split across solo progression, competitive play against other players, and clan content played with a group. A dedicated page covers each mode in more detail; in summary:

• Campaign — story stages across four difficulty settings. The main source of champion experience and early materials.
• Dungeons — a rotating set of bosses that drop gear and the materials used to ascend and upgrade champions.
• Doom Tower — rotating floors with their own bosses and restrictions.
• Arena — several formats, including asynchronous attacks on other players' defence teams, a real-time format with a drafting phase, and a multi-team format.
• Clan content — a shared clan boss fought with daily keys, a harder clan boss, clan-versus-clan Siege, and Faction Wars, which restricts you to one faction at a time.

Faction Wars is the mode that quietly shapes how you play. Because it requires a viable team from a single faction, it pushes you towards keeping champions you would otherwise discard — which is also, not coincidentally, a reason to keep playing.

The core loop and Energy

Battles cost Energy, Energy refills over time, and that refill rate is the real limit on how fast you progress. Silver is the routine in-game currency; Gems are the scarce one, and Gems are what real money most directly buys. Gems can be converted into Energy, which is another way of saying that money converts into time.

This is worth understanding before you spend, because it reframes the question. You are usually not buying power directly. You are buying a shorter wait, plus more random draws. Whether that is worth it is a personal judgement, but it is a clearer one when it is stated in those terms.

What it costs

The download is free and a large amount of content is reachable without paying. That is true, and it is the honest version of "free to play" here.

What is also true, and is often left out of promotional write-ups: this is a heavily monetised game. It sells shards, packs, Gems, Energy refills and recurring subscription-style offers, and it runs frequent limited-time promotions. Critical coverage has been blunt about it — the game has been described in critical reception as an extreme example of pay-to-win. Our own assessment is narrower and, we think, more useful:

• Nearly all content can be cleared without paying, given enough time.
• Top-tier competitive play against other paying players is a different matter. Claiming a free account competes on equal terms at the top of the Arena ladder is not credible.
• Money mainly buys speed and additional random draws, not certainty.

Age rating and spending controls

In Europe the game is rated PEGI 12, for violence and for in-game purchases. The relevant PEGI descriptor is "In-Game Purchases (Includes Random Items)" — the parenthetical is the part that matters, because it is the formal signal that what you buy has randomised contents.

Three things worth doing before anyone in your household spends money:

1. Require authentication for every purchase at device level — a password, PIN or biometric — rather than relying on self-restraint mid-session.
2. Set up family controls (Apple Screen Time, Google Family Link, Microsoft Family Safety) before handing a device to a child, not after a bill arrives.
3. Know where a refund request goes. Payment runs through the store you installed from — Apple, Google, Steam, Epic or Microsoft — so that store is normally the first stop, not the game studio.

If you are in the EU, your statutory consumer rights apply to these purchases and are not removed by anything written in an in-game notice. Our spending and safety page goes into this further.

Who it suits, and who it does not

It suits you if you enjoy optimisation for its own sake — stat tuning, team composition, working out why a fight fails on turn three — and you are comfortable with randomised rewards and a long time horizon.

It does not suit you if you want a finite story you can finish, if randomised purchases are something you would rather avoid on principle or for personal reasons, or if you dislike daily-task design. Nothing here will change those things, and a guide that told you otherwise would be selling rather than informing.

Corrections to an earlier version

This page previously carried claims we could not support. In line with our corrections procedure, they are listed rather than quietly deleted:

Sources and method

Everything above is either mechanically checkable in the game client, or drawn from the public sources below. Where a figure changes over time — roster size, install size, prices, summon rates — we describe the mechanism and point you at the in-game display rather than printing a number that will be wrong next month.

• Wikipedia, Raid: Shadow Legends — release dates, platforms, modes, critical reception, marketing controversy.
• Wikipedia, Plarium — studio background and ownership.
• Business Wire, PC release announcement, 21 January 2020.
• MTG, acquisition of Plarium, and trade coverage of the completed sale in February 2025.
• Plarium's own game page and the platform store listings, for current platform availability and store descriptors.
• PEGI age rating and content descriptors as shown on the European store listings.